Spacecraft are vehicles designed to travel in outer space. They may be manned or unmanned vehicles and can transport payloads, cargo, or crewmembers safely to their destinations.
Spacecraft include Earth-orbiting satellites, space probes and rovers as well as modules comprising the International Space Station. Starships designed specifically for interstellar travel may also qualify as spacecraft.
What is a spacecraft?
Spacecraft are vehicles capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere and traveling into space, used for various purposes including communications, weather observation, planetary exploration or even space tourism. Spacecraft may either be crewed by human pilots or unmanned.
Propulsion systems, typically rocket engines, are an integral component of all spacecraft. Other essential components may include solar panels or nuclear reactors for power; communication networks; and navigation computers.
Crewed spacecraft must provide its occupants with everything necessary for survival in space, including pressurization, radiation shielding and temperature regulation. Such vessels are commonly known as space capsules – examples being the Vostok capsule that carried Yuri Gagarin around the Moon as well as NASA’s current fleet of reusable Apollo capsules.
What is a spaceship?
Spaceships are vehicles designed to travel through outer space. They may transport cargo, astronauts or scientific instruments from one destination in our solar system to the next; depending on its mission it might need to stay in orbit for an extended period of time, or make an unmanned landing on another planet. Spaceships must have onboard power sources – usually solar cells and storage batteries providing energy or radioisotope thermoelectric generators which turn nuclear waste heat into electricity – in order to operate effectively.
Some spaceships resemble airplanes in shape and function; others use rocket propulsion and may be reusable like Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo; Voyager probes and Pioneer 10 will soon leave our Solar System altogether.
What is a space vehicle?
Space vehicles are devices created by humans (whether manned or unmanned) designed for operation outside Earth’s atmosphere, including integral equipment like models, mock-ups, prototypes, molds, jigs and tooling used to manufacture hardware jackets and test coupons – as well as additional items related to tests, transport or storage that could compromise its performance through contamination.
Spacecraft are equipped with propulsion systems designed to get them into orbit, along with navigation and control subsystems (including attitude determination and control, command data handling and thermal management systems), power and thermal controls and satellite payloads for scientific research, telecommunications or other purposes.
Early depictions of spaceflight often depicted streamlined vehicles; however, actual spacecraft have taken many different shapes. Vostok 1 carried Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a full orbital flight in 1961.
What is a spacecraft vehicle?
An orbiting spacecraft requires considerable propulsion for its launch into orbit around a planet or other body in our solar system, provided by either its launch vehicle’s upper stage or jettisonable thrusters. A spacecraft also contains an attitude control subsystem to sense and respond to external torques and forces, and allow accurate pointing towards both scientific objectives (sun pointing for power generation) as well as earth pointing for communications purposes.
The spacecraft bus includes other essential systems, including command and data handling (commonly referred to as CDH or C&DH) and power. Additionally, it contains science instruments encased within a scientific module for use on planet-hopping missions; cameras may also be attached for image capture, spectrometers can determine chemical composition of surface and atmosphere layers as well as radar mapping subsurface terrains.
What is a spaceship vehicle?
Spacecraft refers to any object that travels in outer space, but more specifically it refers to vehicles used for travel or operations in space, with crew aboard for travel or missions in outer space. It may also refer to the International Space Station which serves as our ultimate home away from home.
Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company is currently developing the Starship transport system, which can carry up to 100 people to Mars using rocket engines powered by liquid methane and oxygen fuels.
The system is intended to be refueled on-board like an aircraft, extending its orbital life significantly compared to previous systems. It’s part of its founder’s vision for multi-planetary life; he believes a human colony elsewhere may protect humanity from eventual extinction here on Earth.